Oven....nightmare

So this won't be exactly the most interesting blog, but I wanted to share a recent experience.  The other week I hosted friends over for dinner, and I kept opening the oven to see if the food was ready and each time I opened the oven in front of my guests I would cringe....oh man, my oven is nasty - it is amazing anyone would eat something coming out of this oven.  Crap was all stuck to the side the bottom like black sludge.



 Something must be done, so I decided to experiment....this was mistake number 1. At first I figured I should just do the self cleaning mode on the oven, but then I remembered it was like 95 degrees and having my oven at 900 degrees for several hours was 1) not environmentally friendly and an energy drain and 2) my house would be hot as hades.

So, I found a website that has recipes to make your very own household cleaning products: http://www.ecocycle.org/hazwaste/recipes.cfm

For oven cleaner they give two recipes:

Mix together: ¼ c. baking soda
2 tbsp. salt
Hot water, as needed to make a paste.
Let paste sit for 5 minutes. Caution: Keep off wires/heating elements.
OR
2 tbsp. liquid soap (castile, peppermint)
2 tsp. borax
1 qt. warm water
Spray on oven and wait 20 minutes, then clean. For tough stains, scrub with very fine steel wool and baking soda

Well since I don't know what borax is, I decided to do option one and mix together baking soda, salt, and water.  Good news- I had all of those supplies - WINNING!

So make the paste:

So put the paste all over the dirty oven:

And the paste starts turning black when you rub it in and I guess you wipe it up (the directions were not ubber detailed)

Let's just say this is nasty, and soon feels like you are covered in crap. No matter how much you clean and wipe up, there is still more

And after that, I wiped down the wire racks and was literally sweating my (fill in the blank) off.  At least I don't need to exercise today!!!  After all that hard work, my oven looked better- but not that great - I still could not really see through the glass viewing window.

So I buckled, and decided to do the auto cleaning oven - and 3 hours later I had a sparkling oven - although my house was super hot!

So moral of the story - clean up spills as soon as they happen, every few months use some elbow grease and clean by hand.  BUT, if you oven is super dirty (aka - has never been cleaned), then just go ahead and lose some environmental karma points and do the self clean feature.

Summary: Domestic fail